When trying vodka, try it warm. Any bottom-shelf crap tastes great if kept in the freezer for a while, but the good stuff should be fine at room temperatures, too. And of course only buy Eastern European or Scandinavian vodka, why would anyone drink vodka from France is beyond me.

P.S. Vodka with Pepsi? Sure, why not, get a 2L Pepsi, mix with vodka, stay entertained for the whole concert... Ah, to be young again.

"Political system" included things like free education and free after-school activities (like airplane modeling class or whatnot), so kids so inclined could pursue it even if their parents weren't well off.

In USSR and then Russia we celebrated the New Year in a "secular Xmas" fashion, like /u/dale_glass has explained.

After we moved to the US and had kids, we've moved the celebration to Dec 25, to be in sync with the predominant custom, but the celebration itself is the same: a tree with a star on top, Santa Claus conflated with Ded Moroz, etc.

Once the kids learned that in Russia people do gifts for New Year, they tried to push for getting gifts on both Christmas and New Year, but we've had none of it.

I personally think we should revive the Solstice celebrations, because if anything deserves some veneration it's our dear star, but I'm too lazy to actively push for that.

It's a funny thing that Soviet Russia solved the problem of dissociating this particular holiday from religion to the point that I had no clue there was anything religion related about it until I was a teenager.

And I find it ironic that Christmas itself was assigned to this date to seamlessly move away from the Winter Solstice celebrations.

And yet, the resources of the Immigration services are limited, so just putting people "in a queue" - given how huge that queue is going to be - would significantly increase the processing times for the legal immigrants.

There are tens of thousands of highly educated and skilled people who would love to stay here, but have to wait years for in limbo. Yet we only talk about accepting a millions of low-skilled immigrants, most of whom would need government assistance just to survive. I totally get the humanitarian part of it, but we should really consider if how sustainable this policy is for the country.